Holy Moli: Albatross and Other Ancestors

Product Description

Hob Osterlund moved to Hawai’i after being visited in a dream by an ancestor, Martha Beckwith, author of the monumental classic,
Hawaiian Mythology. It was there, on the island of Kaua’i, where she happened upon a few courting albatross and felt an inexplicable attraction to the birds—an attraction too powerful to be explained by their beguiling airbrushed eye shadows, enormous wingspans, and rollicking dances.
 
In Hawaiian mythology, ancestors may occupy the physical forms of animals known as ‘aumakua. Laysan albatross—known as moli—are among them. Smitten with these charismatic creatures, Osterlund set out to learn everything she could about moli. She eventually came to embrace them as her ‘aumakua—not as dusty old myths on a museum bookshelf, but as breathing, breeding, boisterous realities.
 
Albatross sport many superlative qualities. They live long—sometimes longer than sixty years—and spend the majority of their time airborne, gliding across vast oceanic expanses. They are model mates and devoted parents, and are among the only animals known to take long-term same-sex partners. In nesting season, they rack up inconceivable mileage just to find supper for chicks waiting on the islands of the Hawaiian archipelago.
 
It is from the island of Kaua’i that
Holy Moli takes flight.  Osterlund relates a true tale of courage, celebration and grief—of patience, affection and resilience. This is the story of how albatross guided the author on her own long journey, retracing distances and decades, back to the origin of a binding bargain she struck when she was ten years old, shortly after her mother’s death.
 

Holy Moli is a natural history of the albatross, a moving memoir of grief, and a soaring tribute to ancestors. Within its pages are lyrics of wonder—for freedom, for beauty, and for the far-flung feathered creatures known to us as
albatross.

Review

“Who knew I could fall in love with a bird called the albatross? Hob Osterlund did, thatʻs who. And in Holy Moli sheʻll make you fall in love with them—and her—too, in this moving and fascinating book about birds, loss, and finding a true home in the world.”
Cheryl Strayed, Author of #1 New York Times Bestseller Wild: Lost and Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“Hob Osterlund is a witness to beauty. Her words ground that sacred witnessing on the page with joyous revelations, not without sorrow. The full range of emotion is hers. I look forward to her ongoing relationship of wonder with the albatross.”
Terry Tempest Williams, Author of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place

“The Gulf Coast artist, Walt Anderson, calls birds ‘holes in heaven through which a man or woman may pass.’ The New Mexican sage, Martín Prechtel, calls them ‘an almost molecular presence in our psyches and souls.’ In the spirit of these seers, an orphan named Hob set forth with indefatigable wit, curiosity, eloquence, and a camera named for her departed mom, made a dual home for herself both on the north shore of Kauai and smack dab in the heart of Jesus’ adage Consider the fowls of the air, and the very skies have been served by the interspecies communion that has resulted. Holy Moli is a healing; a hoot; a transmission of gravity-defying wonder.”
David James Duncan, Author of The River Why andThe Brothers K

“I read Holy Moli with mounting amazement. It’s wonderfully informative; Hob Osterlund also knows the albatross in the deepest sense, beyond science. It’s written with wit and humor and passion and love and pain. It’s lively and vibrant and vigorous. It’s imaginative and speculative and shimmering with implication and intimation. You cannot help but turn the page, which is a delicious thing to say of any book. It’s about a riveting creature unlike any other in the world and perhaps the universe. It’s about reverence and respect and resurrection. Quietly and shyly it’s also about the author, which is how books in which the author appears ought to be an